Identities: Found or Constructed?

The question I am raising has to do with an idea that I found in an article called “Defense of the Romantic Poet? Writing Workshops and Voice” by Lensmire and Satanovsky. The authors are talking what kinds of assumptions underlie the teaching of writing in classrooms. One particular paradigm that the authors describe is the Romantic view, which emphasizes self-discovery as the goal of writing. Under this perspective, individuals discover a voice that uniquely belongs to themselves and through the writing process, need to go beyond formality and convention to discover that true voice that is within them. The emphasis in the Romantic view is on liberating oneself from rule based authority or learning in order to ‘find one’s own unique voice’, and this often goes with a spontaneous expression of emotions.

 Many people say that I am too emotionless in my writing style, so they might advocate that I go with the Romantic view and bare my true emotional self to the whole world. But there is another view which suggests that selves are not discovered but are, rather, co-created through social groups. For example, when I am writing for a specific topic in a classroom, I have to actively choose which parts of myself to reveal and how I communicate that self to others. In that sense, I can say that the self is a constructed narrative. Under this view, the self is not ‘discovered’, as though it were concrete and never changing, but is always being negotiated among other selves, in larger institutions and discourses.

 I don’t think that these ways of looking are necessarily incompatible. I think that the Romantic view of writing and self-expression happens to be an in vogue and fashionable way of expression. But it’s not the only way, and it doesn’t work all the time. For example, when I am trying to learn how to approach something that is new to me, or want to change some part of myself, expressing my feelings about this project of learning needs to be supplemented with an account of what I struggle to learn. There needs to be some “other” situation that is not me, or else the feelings have nowhere to move or space to breathe. With novels and personal biography, it is definitely more artistically appealing to have a narrator who shows a grounded connection with her feelings and her sense of the world. But does this kind of communication work when explaining a process, or undergoing a spiritual learning? I suspect that spiritual narrative in particular is a balance between emotional free writing and some thematic contemplation. And the notion of self here is continually changing.

Lensmire D & Satanovsky, L (1998)  Defense of the Romantic Poet? Writing Workshops and Voice. Theory Into Practice (Autumn 1998)